They've created law enforcement excitement that's verged on
panic, given net and media pundits hyperbolic logorrhea about
"cyber terrorism" and "cyber freedom", and happily skipped between
damn funny, deeply disturbing, and self-aggrandising, depending on
the mood of the hive mind at the moment.

"The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really
across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and
living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker,
the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course,
but so does each trickster)," she wrote in Social Text.

The trickster isn't the good guy or the bad guy, it's the
character that exposes contradictions, initiates change and moves
the plot forward. One minute, the loving and heroic trickster is
saving civilisation. A few minutes later the same trickster is
cruel, kicking your ass and eating babies as a snack.

The conversation about Anonymous points to this trickster
nature, veering between praise and fear, with the media at a loss
for even how to describe them.

We've tried hacker group, notorious hacker group,
hacktivists, the Internet Hate
Machine, pimply-faced, basement-dwelling teenagers, an activist
organisation, a movement, a collective, a vigilante group, online
terrorists, and any number of other fantastical and colorful terms.
None of them have ever really fit. Anonymous has constantly forced
us to reach for the thesaurus -- revealing that as a whole, we in
the media have no idea what Anonymous really is or what it
means.

It takes cultures to have albums, idioms, and iconography, and I
was swimming in these and more. Anonymous is a nascent and small
culture, but one with its own aesthetics and values, art and
literature, social norms and ways of production, and even its own
dialectic language.

It is no wonder we in the media and the wider culture are often
confused. Any study of Anonymous must be anthropological, taking
into account the way people exist in different societies. The media
has just been looking for an organisation with a leader who could
explain why Anonymous seems to do weird things. Not only that, but
Anonymous seems to be built around doing weird things, and even has
a term for it: the lulz.

The lulz (a corruption of LOL, online shorthand for laugh out
loud) is the most important and abstract thing to understand about
Anonymous, and perhaps the internet itself. The lulz is laughing
instead of screaming. It's a laughter of embarrassment and
separation. It's schadenfreude.
It's not the anaesthetic humour that makes days go by easier, it's
humour that heightens contradictions. The lulz is laughter with
pain in it. It forces you to consider injustice and hypocrisy,
whichever side of it you are on in that moment.

In the culture of Anonymous, the lulz is the reason for doing.
Anonymous wasn't made for easy times; the trickster sleeps when all
is well.